The Hill Above The Valley

The Checua River valley lies in the high plains north of Bogotá, at an elevation just above 2,500 meters, in the crumpled highland terrain of Colombia’s Eastern Cordillera.

The view from the hill where the ancient people lived is wide and uncluttered — the kind of visibility that hunters value, where you can see across grassland and wetland for a long distance and watch for game moving at the edges of the morning mist.

In 1992, archaeologists excavating on that hill found human bones.

Not a single burial, but the partial remains of roughly thirty individuals spread across the site.

One skull was nearly complete.

The bones were old — old in the way that bones from this part of South America rarely are, old in the way that archaeological sites at this elevation almost never yield, old enough to sit in the shadowy territory of deep prehistory where the questions about who lived here and how they fit into the larger story of human migration become genuinely difficult to answer.

What happened to those remains, and to the DNA eventually extracted from them, is one of the more scientifically significant findings to emerge from South American archaeology in recent years.

A research team led by Kim-Louise Krettek of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment in Germany, working with Colombian scientists including Andrea Casas-Vargas of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a range of international collaborators, spent years working through the biological material from that site and four others on the Bogotá Altiplano.

They extracted ancient DNA.

They sequenced genomes.

They ran the resulting data through the analytical frameworks that modern population genetics uses to place ancient individuals in relation to other populations — living and dead — and to trace the threads of ancestry that connect them.

The results were published in May 2025 in the journal Science Advances under the title “A 6000-year-long genomic transect from the Bogotá Altiplano reveals multiple genetic shifts in the demographic history of Colombia.”

The paper is dense with statistics, populated with genetic comparisons, and written for specialists.

But what it describes is extraordinary.

The seven oldest individuals in the study — people who had lived on that high Colombian plateau roughly 6,000 years ago — represented a genetic lineage that no one had found before.

Not in any ancient South American genome.

Not in any ancient Central American genome.